http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014 ... -hampstead

Second home? Shame on you...

No chance of them being hit by a spare bedroom subsidy cutback.

It rather lays the whole recovery up as an illusion. One company in a tax haven sells a house to another company in a different tax haven for £20 million. On paper, that's £20 million worth of 'recovery in the housing market'. In reality not one penny has been contributed to the UK economy.

Sorry to disappoint you but that's not how it works.
The only asset of the company is the house so you sell and buy the entire company. Change the owner of the company and the house comes with it. No stamp duty paid because the house hasn't been sold. The house is still registered to the same company so the sale (of the house) hasn't happened and no paper gain has been created.

You are welcome.

True but that is not all the transactions. There is an entire block next to the London Assembly being sold to Hong Kong Investors. That is adding to the GDP and the housing bubble.

My current project is being marketed to Malaysian investors directly and is sold out. Means those 400 flats will barely see anyone living there


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So that's a several hundred million pound export order with zero shipping costs and guaranteed maintenance income for decades to come. The French have to make an awful lot of handbags and champagne to get that sort of income.

Sold by a Malaysian developer to Malaysian buyers in Malaysia. How much money will the UK see?


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Whatever it cost the Malaysian developer to buy the land, get you to do your bit, buy cement and bricks and glass, and so on.

You are treating houses as if they are magical things. They aren't, they are stuff that people make and buy and sell.

Housing shortages aren't a result of dodgy foreigners stealing our dwellings by the filthy method of purchasing them. They are caused by antiquated planning, zoning and taxing regimes that cause developers to hoard land instead of developing it.

A system that has councils selling off school playing fields, but denying planning permission for derelict land because they get paid for the field but get bugger all for allowing development on land they don't own is stupid and should have been fixed decades ago.

This whole thread is pointless. The Gruaniad's story is just another "state of the world we live in today" whinge by people who are too insular to bother looking for real causes to problems. It's taken seriously because there is false belief circulating that the Daily Mail is uniquely bad in this respect. The sad truth is that organ's lazy fixation on a handful of cheap never-to-be-examined narratives is simply standard in all mass circulation media.

I still think that when flats and houses get marketed only abroad to people who have no interest in living in the UK, there's something very wrong.

Many are using these homes as an investment. The Chinese usually treat it as an investment for a family member. Some are bought as wedding presents for their infants. You need to consider that the Chinese might not have any loans tied to the property so will be cash buyers. If they are mainland Chinese then they are doing this as a safety net incase of troubles flaring up in China. That can also apply to the Chinese population in Malaysia. It is no different to the people of Spain being pushed inland by the purchase of their coastal resorts by the rest of Europe and the UK. You have entire coastal towns in parts of Spain dominated by one nationality or another. German, English or Russian might be the top language in some towns. It is no different to the case with Cornwall with some villages being ghost towns when the owners are not about.

The thing I genuinely don't get is they're apparently buying them as an investment and then letting them go to ruin, which is surely reducing the appreciation on their investment horribly. Yes, it may be a £20m mansion when it's in perfect nick but if the roof has fallen in and the tennis court is overgrown and the atrium is covered in pigeon crap there are foxes living in the walk in wardrobe in the fourth bedroom, how much is it worth then? If the value of a property in London has been escalating at such a pace that a properties value actually still goes up as it becomes utterly non-functional and frankly falls apart, there's something utterly, utterly broken in that.

Surely if you're investing significant money in property you want the best appreciation possible? That means maintaining the property in good order and, possibly, renting it out to gain further income while it appreciates over time.

It just seems to me these people have literally more money than they know what to do with. They're so ludicrously wealthy that they can put £20m (twenty million pounds) down on a property and just not care what happens to it, have no interest in whether that vast sum of money has been wasted or not. That, by any reasonable assessment, is obscene.

Isn't it the case that these properties will increase in value regardless of their condition, simply by virtue of their address?

I don't see how that's any better than people bidding on price of cereals and making them skyrocket to levels where developing countries cannot afford to feed their people anymore.
Housing is a basic need, it shouldn't be used to speculate.

Yeah, I'm assuming that but I find it amazing that they are apparently increasing in value so quickly that it's more than offsetting the refurb costs of a massive mansion that's turning into effectively a broken shell - a cost which is also accelerating over time. You either assume it's going to keep appreciating forever and everyone buying it is doing so on the basis they're going to make a profit by selling it on to someone else who also has no interest in actually living in it, or you assume at some point someone's going to have to take a whacking hit by having to pay to pretty much have a new mansion built on the site if they actually want to live there.

For those saying 'well, what's the problem with option 1?', I have some Icelandic former investment bankers I'd like you to have a chat to, once they get out of prison. And the fact this kind of speculation is making London an almost impossible place to buy or even rent a house in for any normal person, which anyone who isn't a complete sociopath can see is a bad thing.